[In the following essay, Awkward considers the ways Morrison has incorporated and manipulated the works of earlier African American writers in The Bluest Eye in order to express and validate specific types of African American female experiences whose cultural significance those texts often deny.]

In “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” Toni Morrison insists that ancestors play an essential role in individual works in the Afro-American canon. She states:

It seems to me interesting to evaluate Black literature on what the writer does with the presence of the ancestor. Which is to say a grandfather as in Ralph Ellison, or a grandmother as in Toni Cade Bambara, or a healer as in Bambara or Henry Dumas. There is always an elder there. And these ancestors are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom.¹

Despite the apparent optimistic assurance of this statement, Morrison is well aware that “the presence of the ancestor” is not always viewed by the Afro-American writer as “benevolent, instructive and protective.” Indeed, she argues—just a few sentences following the above declaration that the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin exhibit particularly identifiable problems with the ancestor. For Morrison, Wright's corpus suggests that he “had great difficulty with that ancestor,” and Baldwin's that he was “confounded and disturbed by the presence or absence of an ancestor.”²

Morrison's singling out of Wright and Baldwin as figures in whose works ancestors represent troubling presences (or absences) is not, it seems to me, a random act. For, as Morrison is well aware, the Wright-Baldwin personal and literary relationship represents the most fabled intertextual association in Afro-American letters. Baldwin's attacks on his acknowledged precursor Wright³ offer intriguing Afro-American examples of what Harold Bloom has termed “the anxiety of influence.” In “Alas, Poor Richard,” for example, Baldwin says of his method of creating canonical space for his own perceptions of Afro-American life: “I had used [Wright's] work as a kind of springboard into my own. His own was a roadblock in my road, the sphinx, really, whose riddles I had to answer before I could become myself.”⁴

An intertextual reading of Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), suggests that the works of older Afro-American writers also represented “roadblocks” in her journey to artistic selfhood. Specifically, Morrison's novel contains clear evidence of her (sometimes subtle) refigurations of Baldwin's discussion of Wright in “Many Thousands Gone” and the Trueblood episode in Ellison's Invisible Man. As we shall see, such revisionary acts, as well as her complex manipulation of her novel's prefatory primer, provide Morrison with the means of giving authentication and voice to specific types of black and feminine experiences whose validity and significance these texts—by overt and covert means—deny.

I

In “The Structuring of Emotion in Black American Fiction,” Raymond Hedin astutely discusses Morrison's manipulation of the contents of The Bluest Eye's prefatory primer. Hedin says:

Morrison arranges the novel so that each of its sections provides a bitter gloss on key phrases from the novel's preface, a condensed version of the Dick and Jane reader. These phrases … describe the [American] cultural ideal of the healthy, supportive, well-to-do family. The seven central elements of Jane's world—house, family cat, Mother, father, dog, and friend—become, in turn, plot elements, but only after they are inverted to fit the realities of Pecola's world.⁵

Morrison employs the primer not only as prefatory material to the text proper, but also to introduce the chapters of The Bluest Eye that are recounted by the novel's omniscient narrative voice. The seven epigraphic sections are, as Hedin implies, thematically tied to the chapters which they directly precede.

For example, the chapter which introduces the Breedlove family to the reader is prefaced by the primer's reference to Jane's “very happy” family:

HEREISTHEFAMILYMOTHERFATHER
DICKANDJANETHEYLIVEINTHEGREEN
NANDWHITEHOUSETHEYAREVERYH(6)

But the family presented in the subsequent pages of the novel is the very antithesis of the standardized, ideal (white) American family of the primer. The reader learns, in fact, of the Breedloves' utter failure to conform to the standards by which the beauty and happiness of the primer family (and, by extension, American families in general) are measured.

But it is possible to make further claims for Morrison's employment of the primer as epigraph. In her systematic figuration of an inversive relationship between pretext (the primer) and text (her delineation of Afro-American life), the author dissects, deconstructs, if you will, the bourgeois myths of ideal family life. Through her deconstruction, she exposes each individual element of the myth as not only deceptively inaccurate in general, but also wholly inapplicable to black American life. The emotional estrangement of the primer family members (an estrangement suggested by that family's inability to respond to the daughter Jane's desire for play) implies that theirs is solely a surface contentment. For despite Hedin's suggestion that this family is represented as “healthy” and “supportive,” it appears to be made up of rigid, emotionless figures incapable of deep feeling.

Morrison manipulates the primer in such a manner I believe, in order to trope certain conventions prominently found in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century Afro-American texts. The convention that Morrison revises here is that of the authenticating document, usually written by whites to confirm a genuine black authorship of the subsequent text (for example, William Lloyd Garrison's preface to Frederick Douglass's Narrative). The Afro-American critic Robert Stepto has suggested that the manipulation of such white pretextual authorization of the black voice has had a significant influence in the development of the Afro-American narrative. The Afro-American narrative moves, as Stepto suggests in From behind the Veil, from white authentication of blackness to, with the examples of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, black self-authentication.⁷ Morrison's manipulation of The Bluest Eye's prefatory primer signals, it seems to me, another step in the development of the Afro-American narrative as conceived by Stepto. Morrison returns to an earlier practice—of the white voice introducing the black text—to demonstrate her refusal to allow white standards to arbitrate the success or failure of the black experience. Her manipulation of the primer is meant to suggest, finally, the inappropriateness of the white voice's attempt to authorize or authenticate the black text or to dictate the contours of Afro-American art.

The Bluest Eye's first-person narrator, Claudia, performs a similar act in rejecting white criteria of judgment when she is able to view her childhood, which she had formerly conceived in a vocabulary of pain and degradation, as being characterized by “a productive and fructifying pain” and filled with the protective, “sweet,” “thick and dark” love of a mother “who does not want me to die.”⁸ Like Nikki Giovanni's persona in “Nikki Rosa,” Claudia discovers that despite the difficulties of poverty in an opulent America, “all the while I was quite happy.”⁹

Claudia's achievement of a positive reading of her childhood, however, is not unproblematic, to be sure. Perhaps the most poignant (and certainly the most charged in an intertextual sense) of the incidents that result in her ability to reread her own life is her attempt to understand the rationale for standards that insist on white physical superiority. Claudia's efforts to comprehend the myth of white physical superiority while attempting, at the same time to hold on to her views of her own people's beauty and cultural worth, exposes hers as a situation “betwixt and between” that the anthropologist Victor Turner has labeled liminality or marginality. Marginals, according to Turner,

are simultaneous members (by ascription, optation, self-definition, or achievement) of two or more groups whose social definitions and cultural norms are distinct from, and often even opposed to, one another.¹⁰

To begin to resolve such social ambiguity, Turner argues, it is necessary that the marginal seek both the origin and an understanding of the often self-aggrandizing myths of the “more prestigious group.”¹¹ The questing marginal must seek to understand the origins of myths, “how things came to be what they are.”¹² Consequently, adults' gifts of white dolls to Claudia are not pleasure-inducing toys, but, rather, signs (in a semiotic sense) that she must learn to interpret correctly. Such interpretation requires mining the dolls' surfaces—pink skins, blue eyes, blond hair—a literal search for sources:

I had only one desire: to dismember [the doll]. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me. Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. “Here,” they said “this is beautiful, and if you are on this day ‘worthy’ you may have.” … I could not love it. But I could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable.¹³

Claudia's search for the source of white beauty, however, is not confined solely to dolls. She says that the impulse to dismember white dolls gives way to “The truly horrifying thing”:

… the transference of the same impulse to little white girls. The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so. To discover what eluded me: the secret of the magic they weaved on others. What made people look at them and say, “Awwwww,” but not for me? …

If I pinched them, their eyes—unlike the crazed glint of the baby doll's eyes—would fold in pain, and their cry would not be the sound of an icebox door, but a fascinating cry of pain.¹⁴

Claudia's somewhat sadistic dismemberment of white dolls and her subsequent torture of white girls are meant to recall, it seems to me, Bigger Thomas's axed mutilation of the dead body of Mary Dalton (presented by Wright as a symbol of young white female beauty) in Native Son.¹⁵ Morrison's refiguration of Wright's scene, as we shall see, is her means of adding her voice to the discourse surrounding Bigger's murder, the most renowned of which belongs to James Baldwin.

Claudia's impulses lend nominal weight to Baldwin's claim in “Many Thousands Gone” that “no Negro living in America … has not … wanted … to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low.”¹⁶ But while Baldwin suggests that such violent urges are “urges of the cruelest vengeance” and motivated by “unanswerable hatred,”¹⁷ Claudia's acts are motivated in the main by a need to locate the source of white beauty that is not immediately apparent to her. Baldwin believes that, in general, the Afro-American refusal to give in to such urges and “smash any white face he may encounter in a day” results from a noble embrace of humanity. He states:

the adjustment [from rage to accommodation] must be made—rather, it must be attempted, the tension perpetually sustained—for without this he [the Afro-American] has surrendered his birthright as a man no less than his birthright as a black man. The entire universe is then peopled only with his enemies, who are not only white men armed with rope and rifle, but his own far-flung and contemptible kinsmen. Their blackness is his degradation and it is their stupid and passive endurance which makes his end inevitable.¹⁸

For Baldwin, such “adjustment” allows the Afro-American to claim (or reclaim) his humanity, and to demystify and devillainize whites and to love his own people.

Claudia's adjustment, on the other hand, has significantly different causes and consequences:

When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence [directed toward white girls] was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for refuge. The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned much later to worship her …, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.

(my emphasis)¹⁹

Claudia's “conversion” is motivated not by an embrace of humanity, but rather by “shame.” The questing marginal's quandaries about the origins of this standard remain unanswered. She learns only to feel ashamed of the curiosity that led to her “disinterested violence,” and that her failure to accept without question the standards of white America is considered “repulsive.”

Claudia terminates her search for the source of white myths of superiority and replaces the violent urges she had previously directed at whites with “fraudulent love.” But the suppression of violent urges by Afro-Americans has significantly different implications for Morrison than for Baldwin. For Morrison, the Afro-American's humanity is not what is at stake, and “fraudulent love” of whites, the ultimate result of this rejection of violence, is not better or more authentically human. It is only different, only “adjustment” (an intentional repetition of Baldwin's terminology, it would appear) “without improvement.” Hence, Morrison suggests, in her subtle rejection of Baldwin's reading of Bigger Thomas's humanity, that the adjustment of which the older writer speaks can lead to the devaluation of the authentically black.

II

We have seen how the revisionist impulses of The Bluest Eye plainly demonstrate Morrison's view of the terms in which a truly healthy black art and life are possible. Her provocative revision of Ellison suggests most clearly her view that energetic rejection of male (mis)representations of women is necessary for a faithful and responsible depiction of women's lives. I believe that at the heart of The Bluest Eye's delineation of an incestuous encounter between Pecola and her father is Morrison's intertextually charged revision of the Ellisonian depiction of incest in the Trueblood episode of Invisible Man.

The Breedlove family in Morrison's text possesses a parodic relation to Ellison's incestuous clan. This relation is initially suggested in the names of the respective families. Ellison's designation suggests that the sharecropper and his family are the true (genuine) “bloods” (an Afro-American vernacular term for culturally immersed blacks). The Breedloves' name, however, is bestowed with bitter irony: theirs is a self-hating family in which no love is bred. In both texts the economically destitute families are forced to sleep in dangerously close(d) quarters. In Invisible Man, cold winters—and a lack of money with which to purchase fuel—force the nubile Matty Lou into bed between her still-procreative parents. In the case of The Bluest Eye, Pecola sleeps in the same room as her parents, a proximity that necessitates her hearing the “Choking sounds and silence” of their lovemaking.²⁰

Further, there are stark similarities between mother and daughter in both texts that contribute to the incestuous act in both cases. In a discussion of the Trueblood Episode in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Houston Baker argues that the daughter Matty Lou is her mother “Kate's double—a woman who looks just like her mother and who is fully grown and sexually mature.”²¹ And Cholly Breedlove's incestuous lust is awakened by Pecola's scratching of her leg in a manner that mirrored “what Pauline was doing the first time he saw her in Kentucky.”²²

It is possible, with the above evidence in place, to begin to suggest the specifics of what seems to me to be Morrison's purposefully feminist revision of Ellison. Read intertextually, The Bluest Eye provides—as I shall demonstrate below—an example par excellence of what the feminist critic Annette Kolodny has called revisionary reading [that] open[s] new avenues for comprehending male texts.”²³

In The Resisting Reader, Judith Fetterley argues that the reading of the Western canon's overwhelmingly male (and decidedly phallocentric) texts has encouraged women's agreement with the inscribed antifemale slant of the works. Having been taught to accept the phallocentric as indisputably universal, the woman reader unconsciously internalizes the often misogynistic messages of male texts. Fetterley insists that a female must, in order to participate successfully as a woman in the reading experience, “become a resisting rather than an assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, … begin the process of exorcizing the male mind that has been implanted” in women.²⁴ The removal of the male implant results, for Fetterley, in “the capacity for what Adrienne Rich describes as re-vision, ‘the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.’”²⁵ Feminist revision, according to Fetterley, offers the terms of a radically altered critical enterprise and the liberation of the critic: “books will … lose their power to bind us unknowingly to their designs.”²⁶

Houston Baker's “To Move without Moving” is an excellent example in support of Fetterley's view of the (sometimes dangerously) persuasive powers of texts. For in this essay, we can observe the power of texts quite literally to bind even the most intellectually nimble readers/critics to their designs. Baker has exhibited, in a stunning reading of the economics of female slavery and the figuration of a community of female slaves in Linda Brent's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,²⁷ his awareness of the ways in which feminist theory can help illuminate literary texts. This sensitivity to feminist concerns is, unfortunately, missing from his reading of Ellison. Instead, Baker's essay mirrors the strategies by which Trueblood (and Trueblood's creator) validates male perceptions of incest while, at the same time, silencing the female voice or relegating it to the evaluative periphery.

Baker begins his reading by citing Ellison's discussion in the essay “Richard Wright's Blues” of “The function, the psychology, of artistic selectivity.”²⁸ This function, according to the novelist, “is to eliminate from art form all those elements of experience which contain no compelling significance (my emphasis).²⁹ Ellison's words provide a means to discuss the shortcomings of his own and Baker's treatments of the subject of incest. For Ellison's statement, situated as it is in Baker's essay, leads to an inquiry as to why neither Ellison's text nor Baker's critique of it treat the female perspective on, and reaction to, incest as containing “no compelling significance.”

In the case of the novel, Trueblood's incestuous act is judged almost exclusively by men, from the black school administrators who wish to remove the sharecropper from the community to Trueblood's white protectors who pressure the administrators to allow the sharecropper to remain in his house and who “wanted to hear about the gal [Matty Lou] lots of times.”³⁰ They form, as it were, an exclusively male-evaluate circle which views Trueblood's act as either shamefully repugnant or meritoriously salacious.

Except for the mother Kate's memorably violent reaction, the female perspective on Trueblood's act is effectively silenced and relegated to the periphery in Trueblood's recounting of the story. Never in the share-cropper's rendering of the story are Matty Lou's feelings in the foreground or even actually shared with the reader. Further, Trueblood is well aware of the silent scorn that the women who help Kate attend to the unconscious Matty Lou bear for him. When he returns home after an exile precipitated, in his view, by the inability of others to distinguish between “blood-sin” and “dream-sin,” he orders the scornful community of women that has formed in response to his “dirty lowdown wicked dog” act off his property: “There's a heap of women here with Kate and I runs'em out.”³¹ Having effectively run out the openly critical female community and silenced, by means of his abominable act, his wife and daughter, Trueblood is able to interpret his act in an extremely self-serving way, untroubled by the radically incompatible perspectives of women. Thus he can, despite his belief that he is a good family man, fail to see the bitter irony in his own assessment of his family situation: “Except that my wife and daughter won't speak to me, I'm better off than I ever been before.”³²

From a feminist perspective, Baker's reading of the Trueblood episode proves as problematic as the sharecropper's own because he, too, relegates the woman's voice to the evaluative periphery and sketches his own circle of males to justify and validate Trueblood's act. Baker asserts that one of the dominant themes of Invisible Man is “black male sexuality”³³ and invokes male social thinkers to suggest the accuracy of this reading vis-à-vis the Trueblood episode. And while statements from Clifford Geertz and Freud help Baker to substantiate points about the uncontrollability of phallic energy and about Trueblood's dream signalling a historical regression,³⁴ they fail, because they invoke worlds in which women are indisputably at the mercy of the phallic and legislative powers of men, to allow the critic to consider the response of the victim to her father's act.

And though Baker makes a valiant effort to endow the hastily considered Matty Lou with positive qualities, viewing her—along with her mother—as one of the “bearers of new black life,”³⁵ she remains in the critic's interpretation of the episode—as she does in the sharecropper's narration—simply an absence. While Baker's essay adds immeasurably to our understanding of Ellison's art, it fails, unfortunately, to consider the subsequently silenced victim of Trueblood's unrestrained phallus. Only by failing to grapple seriously with the implications of Trueblood's representation of Matty Lou's state following the incestuous act—“Matty Lou won't look at me and won't speak a word to nobody”³⁶—can Baker conceive of the consequences of the taboo-breaking act as generally beneficial.

Unlike Baker's reading of the Trueblood episode of Invisible Man in which incest is conceptualized as material and tribal gain, Morrison's revision depicts it as painfully devastating loss. Actually, Morrison's reading of Ellison's text must be remarkably similar to Baker's, for in refiguring Trueblood in the character of Cholly Breedlove, she surrounds her creation with images consistent with Baker's conception of the Ellisonian character as majestic Afro-American vernacular artist free from social restraints. Morrison says:

Only a musician would sense, know, without even knowing that he knew, that Cholly was free. Dangerously free. Free to feel whatever he felt—fear, guilt, shame, love, grief, pity. Free to be tender or violent, to whistle or weep. … He was free to live his fantasies, and free even to die, the how and when of which held no interest for him. …³⁷

It was in this godlike state that he met Pauline Williams.³⁸ Only an Afro-American artist with the blues sensibility that Baker argues for Trueblood can organize and transform into meaningfully unified expression the utter chaos of Cholly's life. But Morrison—the remarkably skilled craftsperson who does transform Cholly's life into art—provides the blues song that is The Bluest Eye with a decidedly feminist slant. For while Ellison furnishes his depiction of incest with a vocabulary of naturalism and historical regression that permit it to be read in relation to undeniably phallocentric socio-cultural interpretations of human history, Morrison's representation is rendered in startlingly blunt terms.

Trueblood's presence inside his sexually inexperienced daughter's vagina is described in ways that suggest a significant symbolic import. The sharecropper's dream of sexual contact with a white woman while in the home of an affluent white man necessarily brings to mind images of lynching and castration of black men because of the threat of black male sexuality. Consequently, Trueblood's actual presence inside his daughter assumes less of an importance in the text than his dream encounter with an unnamed white woman. Morrison, however, provides her depiction of incest with no such historically symbolic significance:

[Cholly's] mouth trembled at the firm sweetness of the flesh. He closed his eyes, letting his fingers dig into her waist. The rigidness of her shocked body, the silence of her stunned throat, was better than Pauline's easy laughter had been. The confused mixture of his memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him, and a bolt of desire ran down his genitals, giving it length, and softening the lips of his anus. Surrounding all of this lust was a border of politeness. He wanted to fuck her—tenderly. But the tenderness would not hold. The tightness of her vagina was more than he could bear. His soul seemed to slip down to his guts and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her then provoked the only sound she made—a hollow suck of air in the back of her throat.³⁹

Cholly is far from the majestic figure that Baker argues for Trueblood during his efforts to “move without movin'” in his daughter's vagina. And though Morrison does give the incestuous male figure the capacity for sympathy—citing, for example, the “border of politeness” that accompanies his lust—Cholly's “wild,” “confused” act lacks the inscribed symbolic weight of Trueblood's transgression. While the sharecropper's inability to withdraw from his daughter's vagina represents, according to Baker, Trueblood's “say[ing] a resounding ‘no’ to the castratingly tight spots of his existence as a poor farmer in the undemocratic south,”⁴⁰ the tight sexual space represents for Cholly the forbidden area that must be forcibly entered and exited. The text of The Bluest Eye informs us: “Removing himself from her was so painful to him he cut it short and snatched his genitals out of the dry harbor of her vagina.”⁴¹

Morrison finally seems to be taking Ellison to task for the phallocentric nature of his representation of incest that marginalizes and renders as irrelevant the consequences of the act for the female victim. Morrison writes her way into the Afro-American literary tradition by bringing to the foreground the effects of incest for female victims in direct response to Ellison's refusal to consider them seriously. So while the victims of incest in both novels ultimately occupy similarly asocial, silent positions in their respective communities, Morrison explicitly details Pecola's tragic and painful journey, while Ellison, in confining Matty Lou to the periphery, suggests that her perspective contains for him “no compelling significance.”

While the criticism of The Bluest Eye has correctly demonstrated Morrison's revisionary intentions vis-à-vis its prefatory primer, it has failed to chart its refigurations of such key texts as Baldwin's and Ellison's. The stunning success of Morrison's revisionist gestures is on a par with Baldwin's efforts to clear away the roadblock to his entry into the Afro-American literary tradition, Richard Wright. But unlike Baldwin, Morrison locates her disputes with ancestors primarily within fictional texts. As a result, she is able to create a first novel that represents an important revisionary moment in Afro-American letters, one in which like no novel before it with the exception of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God,⁴² nationalist and feminist concerns combine to produce what Morrison elsewhere has called a “genuine Black … Book.”⁴³ Morrison's revisionary gestures, it seems to me, create canonical space for subsequent black and feminist texts such as Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, and Morrison's own Sula, as well as for the rediscovery of Hurston's classic novel. The Bluest Eye, then, has served to change permanently the overwhelmingly male disposition of the Afro-American literary canon.

Notes

1. Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers (1950-1980), ed. Mari Evans (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 343.

2. Ibid.

3. James Baldwin, “Everybody's Protest Novel,” and “Many Thousands Gone,” in Notes of a Native Son (New York: Bantam, 1955), 9-17, 18-36; Baldwin, “Alas, Poor Richard,” Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dial, 1961), 181-215.

4. Baldwin, “Alas, Poor Richard,” 197.

5. Raymond Hedin, “The Structuring of Emotion in Black American Fiction,” Novel 16, no. 1 (Fall 1982): 50.

6. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970), 34.

7. See Robert Stepto, From behind the Veil (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).

8. Morrison, Bluest Eye, 14.

9. Nikki Giovanni, “Nikki Rosa,” Black Feelings, Black Talk, Black Judgement (New York: Morrow Quill, 1970), 59.

10. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 233.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Morrison, Bluest Eye, 20.

14. Ibid., 22.

15. See Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper and Row, 1940), 90-92.

16. Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” 30.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Morrison, Bluest Eye, 22.

20. Ibid., 49.

21. Houston Baker, “To Move without Moving: Creativity and Commerce,” in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 185.

22. Morrison, Bluest Eye, 28.

23. Annette Kolodny, “A Map of Rereading,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 55.

24. Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), xxii.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., xxii-xxiii.

27. See Baker, “To Move without Moving,” 50-56.

28. Houston Baker, “Richard Wright's Blues,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1964), 94.

29. Ibid., 93.

30. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1952), 52.

31. Ibid., 66.

32. Ibid., 67.

33. Baker, “To Move without Moving,” 180.

34. For Baker's discussion of Geertz and Freud (and others), see Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, 17-84.

35. Baker, “To Move without Moving,” 185.

36. Ellison, Invisible Man, 66.

37. Morrison, Bluest Eye, 125-126.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., 128.

40. Ibid., 187.

41. Ibid., 128.

42. For a discussion of the nationalist and feminist dimensions of Hurston's masterwork, see Michael Awkward, “The Inaudible Voice of It All: Silence, Voice, and Action in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” in Feminist Criticism of Black American Literature, Studies in Black American Literature, vol. 3 (Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill, 1986).

43. Toni Morrison, “Behind the Making of The Black Book,” Black World, February 1974, 89.